To discuss David Byrne, the prolific former Talking Heads
frontman, one should first consider Shania Twain. No, really.

When the predictable midriff-baring country star toured here in
the '90s, she didn't even stay in the same hotel as her band.

Her drummer was a jazz virtuoso who had no love of Twain's
music, but took the gig to pay the mortgage.

Compare David Byrne. Since Talking Heads released their last
album in 1988, Byrne has played with a rotating line-up, yet he's
still close - maybe uncomfortably so - to his musicians.

"I've just been getting things organised for this tour," he says
from his home in New York. "We're going to New Zealand a few days
early. We're going to go on some hikes. Or 'tramps' I think they
call them in New Zealand - although over here that generally refers
to someone out of work.

"There's a lot of people on this tour - we have six string
players and a percussion section - and I wrote to them and said,
'You won't get down here too often. Here's what I'm going to do and
you can join me if you like.'"

So right about now Byrne and several bandmates are lugging
rucksacks through the Kiwi wilderness, somewhere well off the
beaten track.

Which is just where Byrne has always been, musically. And
artistically. A former art student, Byrne offsets making music with
drawing and sculpting; his past artworks include a 70-metre-long
flow chart covering a Manhattan building and an installation of
multiple-choice questions on Tokyo subways. Byrne's art also lit up
bus stops during the 2002 Sydney Festival.

Byrne says he is compelled to tackle new projects.

"I'm not sure that's always a good thing," he says. "If you look
at the great blues artists or others working in a traditional form,
they just stuck with what they were doing. Some of them - when a
country artist went disco, say - you thought, 'This really wasn't
something we needed to hear.' Exploring new genres is not always a
good thing. It's a kind of slightly guilty obsession."

Byrne formed Talking Heads in the early 1970s with fellow art
students, drummer Chris Frantz and bass player Tina Weymouth.

In 1974, they moved to New York and landed a gig supporting the
Ramones at CBGB.

In 1976, keyboard player Jerry Harrison made it a foursome.

With their clever lyrics and disjointed melodies, Talking Heads
became favourites with critics and the cool crowd. Songs such as
Crosseyed and Painless and Houses in Motion
were angular and catchy, avant-garde tunes that occasionally
pre-empted the electronica that became huge a decade later.

Their apex arrived with Once in a Lifetime, the
generation-defining single from the 1980 album Remain in
Light. They hit the mainstream with songs including Burning
Down The House and the rereleased Psycho Killer, and
with the live album and movie, 1984's Stop Making Sense. In
1988, Talking Heads released their final album, Naked.

All along, Byrne had been involved with side projects. In 1981,
he teamed with frequent collaborator Brian Eno to craft a record
featuring samples of preachers and Arabic singers. In 1988, he and
Ryuichi Sakamoto won an Oscar for the score of The Last
Emperor. Then, post-Talking Heads, Byrne started saturating his
music with Latin beats and world-music influences.

"I have alienated large chunks of my audience in the past," he
says.

"I know that. I think I've won some of them back now, but it's
always harder to win them back than to make them go away.

"It happened right after the demise of Talking Heads, in a fit
of showing that I was my own man, and that I can do whatever I
want.

"The next thing I did was all Latin, followed by an orchestral
soundtrack, and I think for a lot of Talking Heads fans that was
it. They thought, 'OK, somebody tell me when he's going to do
something I might like.' But for other people, those were some of
their favourite records I did."

Lately, Byrne has been less petulant. In 2002, the poppy single
Lazy with X-Press 2 went to No. 2 in Britain.

The latest album from the 52-year-old Scottish-born New Yorker,
last year's Grown Backwards, features inventive pop, lush
orchestration and collaborations with artists including Rufus
Wainwright.

It also features some odd covers - Lambchop's The Man Who
Loved Beer, a song from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers (in
French) and a tune from Verdi's La Traviata.

"Singing Verdi was not as hard as certain folks would like you
to think," Byrne says. "They're the sorts of songs Italians sing in
the shower. So I just thought, 'Maybe I should try to unlock some
of my buried melodramatic self.'"

Grown Backwards reveals that Byrne is as predictably
unpredictable as ever, and also that he is in fine form. His recent
live shows have been drawing rave reviews, too.

Byrne says about one-third of his new set is Talking Heads
songs.

"I'm aware there are certain songs people want to hear, and over
the years I've learnt that you can only frustrate people so much
before they go away completely. Also I think those early songs have
held up pretty well."